higan (formerly bsnes)106

higan is a lightweight and portable emulator designed to help you run games compatible with Famicom, Super Famicom, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Super Game Boy, BS-X Satellaview, and Sufami Turbo. It comes packed with several handy options that shouldn't be difficult to figure out.

Portability advantages

Since there is no installation involved, you can save the program files to a custom location on the disk or a removable storage unit to directly launch higan on any computer you have access to. An important aspect worth taking into account is that it does not modify Windows registry settings or create extra files on the disk without your permission, thus leaving no traces behind after its removal.

Simple interface with a game library

Another notable factor of higan is that it is comprised of three separate executable files for running the app, and each of them has settings optimized for emulating video games either accurately, to favor PC performance, or in balanced mode.A window with the game library pops up right after initialization, and you are required to load a game either for Famicom, Super Famicom, Game Boy, or Game Boy Advance. It is possible to populate this library with multiple games to easily administer and launch them, by importing their image files.

Customize audio, video and other settings

Once the game is emulated, you can tweak audio and video settings (if necessary) when it comes to the display mode (center, stretch, scale, aspect ratio, horizontal and vertical mask overscan), shader, synchronization, volume level, frequency, latency, resampler, and colors (saturation, gamma, luminance).Additional options that can be tweaked revolve around the input mode, hotkeys, audio and video delay, the server (hostname, username, password), audio and video drivers, and game library path.

Evaluation and conclusion

We have not come across any stability issues throughout our tests since higan did not hang, crash or pop up error messages. It executes commands swiftly and runs on a decent amount of CPU and RAM. To sum it up, this software application features useful and effective options for emulating your favorite games.